A wonderfully preserved erotic fresco from the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, where Dave and I vacationed this summer. The museum is truly a shambles - the nonchalant disregard with which Italians seem to treat the priceless art that saturates their country is pretty shocking - but it's full of amazing treasure.

It reminds me of another of my favorite paintings of someone copping a feel, this lovely, strange picture in the Louvre of two noblewomen in a bathtub, one carefully tweaking the other's nipple.

And here's another vibrant, punchy southern Italian wall-painting that I saw in Naples this summer, but from much more recent times:

It's pretty fucking fabulous, isn't it? Can you see that that's a gun over her head, with a bloody drip coming out? Dave and I were reading this book Gomorrah while we were on vacation, all about the horrifyingly high body count the Camorra continues to stack up in and around the grim industrial suburbs of Naples. The prose is rather relentlessly purple, but it does in fact relate some truly appalling statistics about organized crime and its continued reign of terror. This graffiti rather satisfyingly confirmed - with a nod to art history, and a bit of a shiver - that the scary stories really are true.